I’d like to begin by formally congratulating and welcoming our new Chair, Regent Katherine White, and our new Vice Chair, Regent Mark Bernstein.

Regent White was first elected to the board in 1998, and I’m so grateful for her relentless dedication, her unstinting service and her steadfast commitment to the University of Michigan. I’m equally grateful to Regent Bernstein, who brings a wealth of expertise having earned three different degrees from this university.

I’d also like to formally welcome Dr. Laurence Alexander, our new chancellor for Flint campus, who took the helm of our beloved U-M Flint community on July 1st and joins us today for his first of what we hope to be many Board of Regents meetings.

And I’d like to congratulate our Vice President for Research and Innovation Partnerships teams for a record-breaking year of 615 invention reports. In the last decade, only one other university – MIT – has reported more than 600 inventions in a single year.

Finally, I’d like to congratulate Ruth Behar, a Professor of Anthropology in the College of Literature Science and Arts, who was recently announced as our Henry Russell Lecturer, along with the four Henry Russell Award Winners.

The Henry Russell Lecturer is considered the University’s highest honor for a senior member of its active faculty, and I’m so proud of the extraordinary scholarship of Professor Behar and her outstanding colleagues.

Later in our meeting, the regents will consider a joint operating agreement between the University of Michigan Health and MSU Health Care to provide neurosurgery and neurology care, marking an unprecedented collaboration between the state’s two leading academic institutions.

Specifically, they are proposing the Neuro Care Network, a joint operating agreement that will include practitioners from both of our institutions, and one that will enhance neurosurgery and neurology treatment for patients throughout mid-Michigan, while also ensuring those patients stay close to their loved ones.

Under this new agreement, a dedicated team of neurosurgeons and neurologists will provide world-class care at UM Health-Sparrow in Lansing and MSU Health Care in East Lansing.

Together, they will care for more patients, help to recruit more neurology specialists to mid-Michigan, and most importantly, transform more lives.

I look forward to full consideration of this proposed agreement, and to the great good that will come to the people of Michigan from this potential collaboration.

As we look to the fall, we’ll be building on our great tradition of excellence and achievement, especially since U.S. News and World Report recently ranked U-M 19th overall among the world’s top 2,250 global universities.

I’m convinced that as one of the world’s foremost universities, we must be as excellent in the sciences as we are exceptional in the arts.

That’s why I was so pleased that this month, Mark Clauge began a five-year appointment as the inaugural executive director of our Arts Initiative.

Mark, a professor of music in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, had previously been serving as the initiative’s interim director, and I’m looking forward to all that we will do together to spark joy, to open imaginations, and to create meaning across our community.

I also note with great appreciation that the University Musical Society recently received the largest gift since its founding in 1879.

That $5M gift came from alumna Eileen Weiser and her husband, Richard “Dick” Caldarazzo, to establish the Weiser Caldarazzo Iconic Artists Endowment Fund which will support two performances by significant artists or ensembles recognized as icons in today’s vibrant performing arts scene.

Our imprint and impact is also continuing to grow on Broadway, with 13 of our alumni engaged with Tony Award-winning dances and plays.

In addition, our outstanding team at Michigan Medicine was recently awarded a $10M grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a new, multidisciplinary center which will use genomics to accelerate the understanding of pathogens that threaten human life.

I’d also like to congratulate the U-M team from the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering for recently winning NASA’s inaugural Human Lander Challenge.

They beat out 12 other teams, but far more importantly, provided an important potential solution for a complex challenge related to returning humans to the moon, one that may further enable lunar science and exploration.

Finally, later this month we’ll have more than 50 members of the U-M family engaged in the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, including ten coaches and more than 40 athletes. Let’s join together in cheering them on – that their relentless hours of practice and preparation will be crowned with achievement, honor and victory.

With that, let’s go into the rest of our business for the day … and Go Blue!